A Grandma And Her Grandchildren Are So Different In Their Critical Sensitivity Towards High-tech Weapons And Contamination Of The Earth, Nature And Life In Comparison With The Elegant Or Crude Philistines In Kurosawa’s “Rhapsody in August” And the boy a rose did see, a rose standing in the field blossoming in innocence, awed by the […]

Two Types of Creative Artists – Artist-Porter (Entertainer) And Artist-Prophet (Truth-Sorcerer) “They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail” (written and directed by Kurosawa) is based on the Kabuki play “Kanjincho” which in turn is based on the Noh play “Ataka”. The film was initially banned by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) due […]

Life Of Petty Calculations vs. An Existentially Spiritual Meaning Of Life That Grants Freedom From Death Those who see Ikiru as a social statement have their reasons for doing so, though to see it only as statement, is to do it an injustice. Donald Richie, “The Films of Akira Kurosawa”, Univ. of California Press, 1996, […]

Critical Perspectives on Western and Eastern Cultural Traditions “Dodesukaden” is a film without plot, comprising instead a series of episodes in the lives of a village of slum dwellers… Kurosawa abandons the normal onomatopoeic word for the sound of a trolley, gatan goton, for an imaginative fantasy word. “Dodesukaden” is shouted by a retarded boy […]

Sanjuro as an Independent Intellectual (How Not to Collaborate with Monarchy of Money/Power) “The idea of ‘Yojimbo’ is about rivalry when both sides are equally bad…and it is impossible to choose between evils. Myself, I’ve always wanted to somehow stop these senseless battles of bad against bad, but we’re all more or less weak – […]

Kurosawa Probes into What Might Have Come to Be For All of Us but Never Got a Chance to Realize Itself As a person belonging to a hypothetical – an alternative civilization where man collaborates with nature instead of trying to dominate it (which didn’t have a chance to develop), Dersu cannot be observed in […]

Noble Poverty as an Alternative to the Orientation on Power and Wealth – to a Life of Self-Aggrandizement and Vanity (Analysis of Twenty Two Stills from “Sanjuro”) For a samurai who eternally wanders from place to place because of moral disagreement with the way people live – to meet by chance a group of younglings […]

Identification with the Leaders Is the Main Origin of Human Happiness in Impossible Circumstances Deadly tired soldiers are sleeping or semi-sleeping, between glorious military actions, on the stones. These people take life as it is – they are completely adapted to the vain war between rivaling war lords. They take war as a norm. They […]